I would like to say for
the record that -- and also for the men behind me who are also
wearing the uniform and their medals -- that my sitting up here is
really symbolic. I'm not here as John Kerry. I'm here as one member
of a group of 1000, which is a small representation of a very much
larger group of veterans in this country. And were it possible for
all of them to sit at this table, they would be here and have the
same kind of testimony.

I would simply like to
speak in very general terms. I -- I apologize if my statement is
general because I received notification yesterday you would hear me,
and I'm afraid, because of the injunction, I was up most of the
night and haven’t had a great deal of chance to prepare.

I would like to talk
representing of all those veterans and say that several months ago in
Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably
discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to
war crimes committed in Southeast Asia.

*These were* not isolated
incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full
awareness of officers at all levels of command. It's impossible to
describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit -- the emotions
in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their
experiences in Vietnam. But they did. They relived the absolute horror of what
this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told the stories of times
that they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads,
taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up
the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at
civilians, razed villages in the fashion reminiscent of
Genghis Khan,
shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally
ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal
ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is
done by the applied bombing power of this country.

We call this
investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation." The term
Winter
Soldier is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776 when he
spoke of the
Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted
at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

And we who have come
here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be
winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; and we
could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what
went on in Vietnam. But we feel because of what threatens this
country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, not
redcoats but the crimes which we’re committing are what threaten it;
and we have to speak out.

I would like to talk to
you a little bit about what the result is of -- of the feelings these men
carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn’t
know it yet but it’s created a monster, a monster in the form of
millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in
violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest
nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and
a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.

As a veteran, and one who
feels this anger, I’d like to talk about it. We’re angry because we
feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the Administration of
this country. In 1970 at West Point,
Vice President Agnew said:

Some glamorize the criminal misfits of
society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the
freedoms which those misfits abuse.

And this was used as a rallying
point for our effort in Vietnam.

But for us, his boys in
Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a
terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of
revulsion; and hence the anger of some of the men who are here in
Washington today.

It’s a distortion because we in no way considered
ourselves the best men of this country; because those he calls
misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this
country dared to; because so many who have died would have returned
to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an
immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam; because so many of those
best men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees, and they lie
forgotten in Veterans Administration hospitals in this country
which fly the flag which so many have chosen as their own personal
symbol.

And we cannot consider ourselves America’s best men when we
were ashamed of and hated what we were called to do in Southeast
Asia. In our opinion, and from
our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which
could happen that realistically threatens the United States of
America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in
Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation
of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the
height of criminal hypocrisy, and it’s that kind of hypocrisy which
we feel has torn this country apart.

We are probably much
more angry than that and I don’t want to go into the foreign policy
aspects because I’m outclassed here. I know that all of you have
talked about every possible -- every possible alternative to getting
out of Vietnam. We understand that. We know that you’ve considered
the seriousness of the aspects to the utmost level and I’m not going
to try and deal on that. But I want to relate to you the feeling
which many of the men who’ve returned to this country express because
we are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam
and about the mystical war against communism.

We found that not only
was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been
seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but
also we found that the Vietnamese, whom we had enthusiastically
molded after our own image, were hard put to take up the fight
against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.

We found that most
people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy.
They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters
strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and
tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the
war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of
America, to leave them alone in peace; and they practiced the art of
survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a
particular time, be it Vietcong, North Vietnamese, or American.

We found also that all
too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of
support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American
taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many
people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by
our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties.
We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by
search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism; and
yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc
on the Vietcong.

We rationalized
destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her
sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a
My Lai and refused
to give up the image of American soldiers that hand out chocolate
bars and chewing gum. We learned the meaning
of "free-fire zones,"
"shoot anything that moves," and we watched while
America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals. We watched the United
States' falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of
body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the
back of the enemy was about to break.

We fought using weapons
against “oriental human beings,” with quotation marks around that.
We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe
this country would dream of using were we fighting in a European
theater -- or let us say a non-third-world people theater. And so we
watched while men charged up hills because a general said "That hill
has to be taken." And after losing one platoon or two platoons they
marched away to leave the hill for the reoccupation by the North
Vietnamese; because -- because we watched pride allow the most unimportant of
battles to be blown into extravaganzas; because we couldn’t lose,
and we couldn’t retreat, and because it didn’t matter how many
American bodies were lost to prove that point. And so there were
Hamburger Hills and
Khe Sahns and
Hill 881's and Fire Base 6's and
so many others.

And now we’re told that
the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are
lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of
Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.

Each day -- Each --

Committee Chair (Sen.
Fulbright): I hope you won’t interrupt. He’s making a very
significant statement. And let him proceed.

Mr. Kerry: Each
day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her
hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so that United
States doesn’t
have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that
we can’t say that we’ve made a mistake. Someone has to die so that
President Nixon won’t be, and these are his words, “the first
President to lose a war.”2

And we are asking
Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the
last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man
to die for a mistake? But we’re trying to do that, and we’re doing
it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the
President’s last speech to the people of this country, you can see
that he says, and says clearly:

But the issue,
gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or
not we will leave that country to the Communists or whether or not
we will try to give it hope to be a free people.3

But the point is they’re
not a free people now -- under us. They’re not a free people. And we
cannot fight communism all over the world, and I think we should
have learnt that lesson by now.

But the problem of
veterans goes beyond this personal problem, because you think about
a poster in this country with a picture of
Uncle Sam and the picture
says “I want you.” And a young man comes out of high school and
says, “That’s fine. I’m going to serve my country.” And he goes to
Vietnam and he shoots and he kills and he does his job or maybe he
doesn’t kill, maybe he just goes and he comes back. When he gets
back to this country he finds that he isn’t really wanted, because
the largest unemployment figure in the country -- it varies depending
on who you get it from, the Veterans Administration 15 percent,
various other sources 22 percent -- but the largest figure of
unemployed in this country are veterans of this war. And of those
veterans 33 percent of the unemployed are black. That means 1 out of
every 10 of the nation’s unemployed is a veteran of Vietnam.

The hospitals across the
country won’t or can’t meet their demands. It’s not a question of
not trying. They haven’t got the appropriations. A man recently died
after he had a tracheotomy in California, not because of the
operation but because there weren’t enough personnel to clean the
mucous out of his tube and he suffocated to death.

Another young man just
died in a New York VA hospital the other day. A friend of mine was
lying in a bed two beds away and tried to help him, but he couldn’t.
They rang a bell and there was no one there to service that man, and so
he died of convulsions.

Fifty-seven percent -- I
understand 57 percent of all those entering VA hospitals talk about
suicide. Some 27 percent have tried, and they try because they come
back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam,
and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that
doesn’t really care, that doesn’t really care.

And suddenly we are faced
with a very sickening situation in this country because there’s no
moral indignation, and if there is it comes from people who are
almost exhausted by their past indignincies [sic], and I know that many of
them are sitting in front of me. The country seems to have lied -- lain down
and accepted something as serious as Laos, just as we calmly
shrugged off the
loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan, the so-called
greatest disaster of all times.

But we are here as
veterans to say that we think we are in the midst of the greatest
disaster of all times now because they are still dying over there,
and not just Americans, Vietnamese, and we are rationalizing leaving
that country so that those people can go on killing each other for years
to come.

Americans seem to have
accepted the idea that the war is winding down, at least for
Americans, and they have also allowed the bodies, which were once
used by a President for statistics to prove that we were winning
this war, to be used as evidence against a man who followed orders
and who interpreted those orders no differently than hundreds of
other men in South Vietnam.

We veterans can only
look with amazement on the fact that this country has not been able
to see that there's absolutely no difference between a ground troop
and a helicopter crew. And yet, people have accepted the
differentiation fed them by the Administration. No ground troops are
in Laos, so it's alright to kill Laotians by remote control. But
believe me, the helicopter crews fill the same body bags and they
wreak the same kind of damage on the Vietnamese and Laotian
countryside as anyone else, and the President is talking about
allowing that to go on for many years to come. And one can only ask if
we will really be satisfied when the troops march in to Hanoi.

We are asking here in
Washington for some action, action from the Congress of the United
States of America which has the power to raise and maintain armies
and which by the Constitution also has the power to declare
war. We've come here, not to the President, because we believe that
this body can be responsive to the will of the people; and we believe
that the will of the people says that we should be out of Vietnam
now.

We're here in Washington
also to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of
war and diplomacy. It's part and parcel of everything that we are
trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country: the
question of racism, which is rampant in the military; and so many
other questions also: the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our
taking umbrage in the...Geneva
Conventions and using that as justification for
continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body
of violations of those Geneva Conventions -- in the use of free-fire
zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions,
the bombings, the torture of prisoners, the killing of prisoners --
accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That's what we're
trying to say. It's part and parcel of everything.

An American Indian
friend of mine who lives on the
Indian nation of Alcatraz put it to
me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation
he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they
came in and shot the Indians. And then suddenly one day he stopped
in Vietnam and he said, "My God, I'm doing to these people the very
same thing that was done to my people," -- and he stopped. And that's
what we're trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.

We're also here to ask
-- We are here to ask and we're here to ask vehemently, Where are
the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to
ask: Where are
McNamara,
Rostow, Bundy4,
Kilpatrick5, and so
many others. Where are they now that we the men whom they sent off
to war have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their
troops and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The
Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never
leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and
retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left
the real stuff of their reputations, bleaching behind them in the
sun in this country.

And finally, this
Administration has done us the ultimate dishonor. They've attempted
to disown us and the sacrifices we made for this country. In their
blindness and fear, they have tried to deny that we are veterans or
that we served in Nam. We do not need their testimony. Our own scars
and stumps of limbs are witness enough for others and for ourselves.
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that
service as easily as this Administration has wiped their memories of
us.

And all that they have
done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear
than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission: to
search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to
pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven
this country these last 10 years and more -- and more.

And so, in 30 years
from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an
arm or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say
"Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory but mean
instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers
like us helped it in the turning.

Thank you.

*= content within asterisks absent from
this audio and unverified as delivered. Extant video indicates that an
(ostensibly small) portion of the proceedings occurring between the end of
Senator Fulbright's introductory remarks and the beginning of Mr. Kerry's
statement was clipped. The Congressional Record of the proceedings includes the
opening salutation noted at the beginning of this transcript.